


the atlantic was born today

by theviolonist



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Abortion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 05:09:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1333135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So we're doing this. I have to tell you, Ronnie, never thought we'd have the Talk, you and me. Our idyllic future involved a lot more white beaches in a significantly warmer hemisphere and sex marathons and a lot less baby talk."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the atlantic was born today

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [youcallitwinter](http://youcallitwinter.livejournal.com/)'s [get out while we're young](http://youcallitwinter.livejournal.com/119539.html) ficathon, for the prompt: _veronica/logan, post-movie, accidental pregnancy_.

He laughs, weakly, but she knows him well enough to know that he's terrified, "So they weren't lying, huh. Neptune really is on a hellmouth."

She's not hurt. She's not. She feels the same way he does about it. "Not sure that's how it works, Echolls. I can't really see the spirit of Neptune poking hole in condoms," she jokes feebly. 

Though, of course, what he means is: you know what Neptune does, what it really does, it twists and sours and rots inside you, it makes cars veer off the road and smash into other cars, it makes us sixteen again and it puts your dad in hospital and it makes me fuck the sadness out of you against a wall because that's how it happens, that's how it always happens.

He sits on the couch, takes the cap off, links his hands. If she didn't know him better she'd think he doesn't look like his old self at all anymore; but she does, and she knows it's the most alike they've ever been since she came back. 

"Well," he says, not looking at her, "what are you gonna do about it?"

 

—

 

Piz would've been ecstatic about it. Piz would've danced around like a lunatic and kissed her flat belly and snuck worried glances at her, because she's the one who already told him once she didn't want kids, not now not ever, it's not her fault she has the vagina that makes it a possibility. The one who'd said, I know how bad parents fuck up their children. I'm not gonna be that person. 

Not Logan. Logan sits there, stunned into silence and she can almost tell what he's thinking, except not really.

He asks, "Do you want to keep it?"

And she can't help retorting, a little mad, "It's your choice, too. You're the one who impregnated me, remember?" she even smiles a little, look at her, what a trooper. 

And he looks at her. He looks at her, angry now, that face that says, don't bullshit me, Veronica Mars, just because you spent ten years pretending to be a good girl doesn't mean you're not the same control freak you were in high school, and he's right, but he's wrong, too. People change. She's changed; enough to spend hours looking at her hands in the waiting-rooms of law firms she wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, _before_ ; and he's changed enough that he puts on a fucking uniform in the morning and does whatever other people tell him to.

The point being, she can take him telling her he doesn't want it. It'll be like a reunion thing: let's get rid of our lovechild together, hold my hand while it bleeds out of me. Hey — they've always been fucked-up, no surprise there.

But of course he's Logan, he can't help but make trouble, medals or no medals —"What if I did? What if _I_ wanted to keep it?"

Veronica almost laughs. In the end, though, she doesn't. 

 

—

 

"You don't want to keep it."

He looks point blank at her, like they never made up, "What a novelty, Veronica Mars telling me what I do and don't want. And I thought I'd never get to hear it again."

 _Fuck you._ She reins it in, though; now is not the time to be sixteen again, take out her taser and say, one more step and you're gonna go fizz, buddy, I'd be careful if I were you. "It's not a good idea. We've been together for, what, three months now?"

There's a deadline to that thing. It's not like they can pretend it doesn't exist, either, because it does: in two weeks Logan has to go back to active duty and if she hasn't gotten rid of it in three it's game over. (And maybe, maybe she also thinks there's a deadline to the other thing, to _them_ , the kind of deadline that loops around in circles and comes back to eat its own tail; so sue her, if she does.)

But he says — "And I've loved you since I was sixteen," without blinking, like it makes everything okay. She knows he's been planning on it choking her up but she can't prevent it, the way her breath hitches in her throat. He's never been shy about cheating at poker.

So she bites, "Right, Logan. I can already see us in our two-bedroom apartment with a fucking _toddler_ ; way to break the Bonnie and Clyde tendencies, don't you think?" because there's no need to pretend, it's not like their game hasn't been clawing and crashing since the beginning, "I'll just go around with our kid in the backseat while I chase down murderers and in the evenings I'll be... what, an army wife? Can't wait."

He blanches a little, but what the hell, he deserves it, he always deserves what she throws at him – except he doesn't, not really — because he takes a sick pleasure in _pushing_. It was fine, that truce with the world, as long as it was devoid of conversation, fucking and eating in bed for two weeks straight until he left and pretending her coming back and slinging that bag over her shoulder doesn't mean a childhood flashback instead of a fairytale movie-ending.

Veronica knows better than most, though, eventually you've always got to wake up. 

 

—

 

She sleeps at her dad's for the next two days and he doesn't ask any questions, only frowns this annoying fatherly _I didn't want this to happen but I knew it would_ frown, cramming her full with homemade lasagna and stories about the fall of Lamb and the frankly hilarious tantrums that come with it. He doesn't say anything about his hopes to be elected sheriff again, not to jinx it, but it's not like she doesn't know. Logan doesn't call and Veronica can't help going back to her old fights with him, for reference; can't help thinking maybe Dick's whisked him off to Tijuana to drown the fear of impending fatherhood in cheap vodka and even cheaper whores. Then she forces herself not to think about it — if there's anything Veronica Mars has, it's willpower. 

Because she couldn't keep still if she were paid to do it she acts as a glorified secretary, even though her father doesn't need it; files and answers the phone and re-opens cold cases that have no chance of being solved for the sheer pleasure of making her brain cells work instead of panicking over everything that she left behind to get stuck knee-deep again in the thick Neptune grime — she couldn't take it ten years ago; what says she can now? — and the fact that there's a living thing in her belly, even if it's still in the embryo state. She was never — well.

But that too has to end, of course. On Sunday night her father sits her down at the kitchen table, gives her a mug of coffee even though Veronica rolls her eyes at him, _you don't have to coddle me_ and sighs.

"Ominous," Veronica chirps, taking a sip of her coffee. 

"What's going on, honey?" he asks, a deep wrinkle barring his forehead. She hates worrying him. 

"What do you mean?" she says, trying for light-hearted. "Can't a daughter crash on her father's couch and mope for three days just for old time's sake?"

He cracks a half-smile, largely out of pity, she suspects. "Spit it out. Did something happen with Logan? Do I need to break out the trusty old bat?"

She doesn't know what possesses her to say it, really. She's usually so good at keeping secrets. "I'm pregnant."

For a second he just stares at her, doesn't say anything. She can see on his face that he didn't expect that, everything but that: maybe Logan was in prison again, maybe there was a murderer on her tracks, maybe Piz had decided to sue her for alimony, what the fuck ever... but _pregnant_? Veronica? Veronica shrugs, telegraphing, _yeah, me too_. 

"Did you tell Logan?" he asks, and after a second of hesitation, "Is it his?"

Veronica considers making a joke about straying when she's got all that luscious man-meat in uniform at home — not that she calls it that, _home_ , even though the amount of time she's been spending there probably qualifies it as her permanent residence — but refrains. 

"Yes," she says, "it's is. And I have told him, thus my," she gestures at the couch, "impinging on your hospitality."

He gives her a Look, _don't be stupid_. "Okay," he says, digesting the info. "So what is it? Does he not want it? Do you..." he doesn't complete the sentence. She knows — of course she does — that he would like grandchildren some time in the future, if possible, but she also knows that he knows her, how afraid she is to wind up like Lianne Mars, lying down on their kitchen floor crying about a bottle; how afraid she is of everything, deep down. 

"A little bit of both," she says honestly, suddenly feeling tired. Then: "He's leaving soon."

Keith nods.

"I have to make a decision," she says. But she can do that, make the decision. She's good at it, even: she'll make the appointment and she'll go alone, holding her own hand, walking down the sterile corridors and not looking at anyone who might recognize her, and then she'll go back to — wherever it is she lives now, and she'll cry the grief out. It'll only be one more scar, so small it won't take up any space in her arsenal. All good. 

So she says, her voice smaller, because this is her father, the only person she can actually be unguarded with, "He said he wanted to keep it."

She thinks to explain, I'm not sure he didn't mean it as a joke, a way to provoke me...; doesn't plead, what do I do? because she's still Veronica Mars and she's got pride in buckets. She keeps her chin up instead, a little defiant.

Keith sighs. "Honey," he says. It sounds suspiciously like, _looks like I can't help you this time_.

 

—

 

Logan shows up at her father's door the next morning, looking absolutely wrecked. She opens the door, a little gingerly, phone cradled in her hand from spending a good part of the night being talked down by Mac, who'd been the one to handle her first phonecall two months and a half ago, Veronica sitting prone on the toilet seat, stunned out of her cynicism. 

"Come to beg for forgiveness, Echolls?"

He twists his mouth into something resembling a smile. "Not a chance, Mars."

She supposes it's largely instinct, the adrenaline that has his hands jittery and all the questions jangling in his brain, that makes him duck and splay one hand over her jaw, palm so large it's almost enveloping her cheek, thumb pressing on her throat; he hesitates for a second, then he kisses her. 

And it's dumb, that after all these years, after two weeks spent doing nothing but re-categorizing every part of his body she'd missed in high school, too caught in the frenzy of her own angst, and trying to leave a bite mark on every single one of them; that after all that she still feels dizzy when he kisses her, like the taste on his lips isn't bitter coffee but gazoline, fuel, even though she knows really it's only helium, would leave her collapsing if she tried to take more than one step on it.

He pulls back; looks down. 

"Well hello there," Veronica says with a slight leer, just to dispel the horrible awkwardness. 

He scrubs a hand over his face, then pretends to peek behind her. "Can I take you to breakfast or will you father take out the shotgun?"

She grins — feels like the old days — and links her arm with his. "Guess we'll have to see."

 

—

 

At breakfast he doesn't eat, won't look at her. This time she knows what he's thinking, because she's seen the expression on his face before: the scars on his back that people assume are from something else, every time, something he must've brought on himself since he's such a troublemaker and half of the world still prefers to ignore Aaron's late-revealed preference for fucking teenage girls and bludgeoning them; and the other scars, the one that the eye can't see.

"You gonna eat that particular pancake, Mars?" he says eventually, sneaking her a glance and smiling from the corner of his mouth, "because if you're not, I know someone -"

"Have at it," she says with a half-groan, laughing a little.

He chews, and she takes a breath, says, after a while, "I can't give up coffee."

He winces. "So we're doing this. I have to tell you, Ronnie, never thought we'd have the Talk, you and me. Our idyllic future involved a lot more white beaches in a significantly warmer hemisphere and sex marathons and a lot less baby talk."

She winces at _baby talk_ , without really meaning too. "Yeah, well. You can't always get what you want," she sing-songs, "but if you try sometimes..."

"Yeah, yeah." Then he sobers up, "So. Can't give up coffee, huh?"

"Fraid not." Maybe if she keeps her lips tight enough she'll even manage to make it look like she's sure about it. 

He looks faraway for a moment, like he's considering arguing over it, and for a second she even hopes he will, as crazy and badly-timed and ill-thought-out as it all is. Then he reaches for her hand, rubs his thumb over her knuckles — she hadn't realized how white they were, from holding onto the wood like she's afraid she'll float away, even though she feels like her whole body is made of lead — and: 

"Well, if about ninety percent of our genetic pool is anything to go by, it's probably better that way."

And that's that.

 

—

 

They don't discuss it, not really. She takes her bag from the side of the couch and her toothbrush from the bathroom, hugs her dad too hard considering he's still in recovery and leaves in the car with Logan. On the way back they don't talk, roof open and the music surrounding them and Veronica considers saying, _let's go to Vegas_. She's not sixteen anymore, though, and neither is he, despite what circumstances would have them believe, so she doesn't. 

She crawls into bed without thinking, without even taking her jeans off, and after a second spent looking at her from the edge of the bed, his eyes unreadable, she gets tired of it and says, "Get in, Creepy McCreep," and he does, thank God for that. 

When the night falls they're still entwined, unspeaking. It's not really comfortable, but Veronica takes it for what it is: disaster relief, the warmth of a body around her like a shock blanket, tension seeping out of her body and into his and vice versa until it dispels somewhere in between, crawls down the bed and into the night. It's not a big deal, this whole thing – except it is. 

When the room is completely dark she wriggles around in his arms until they're face to face. He's awake, she can feel it: his breath on her face, his heartbeat, a little faster than normal. For years she thought she would never forget that rhythm, would calibrate every one of her boyfriend's failures to it, would awake from nightmares of the car catching on fire as soon as she passed the _Welcome to Neptune_ sign with it beating in her ear. She wasn't wrong.

"So..." she says, tangling her legs with his even further, so that it almost cuts off her blood supply. 

"So," he whispers back, sounding exhausted.

Something, maybe the same suicidal instincts that made her jump back in the wolf's mouth every time back then, makes her bold enough to say, "How about it?"

His heart goes off like canon.

"Not now. You know, when we've..." she nestles her face into his throat, tries to pretend she isn't scared as shit, "when we've ascertained that we can do this without anything in the vicinity going nuclear, when — if — the timing ever gets appropriate..."

"Yes."

It's muffled, half smothered in the pillow like he wants to make sure he can take it back, but it's there, and he said it, and he won't; Veronica feels abruptly like she's proposing. 

He laughs, a little helpless. She really did think he might have said it — _what if I want to keep it?_ —, before, purely for the pleasure of provoking her; looks like Logan Echolls can still surprise her.

"No, but really. Can you see me in the suburbs, pushing a pram while you hash out the mission of the week with your old buddy the PCH gang leader who happens to hate my guts?"

"When you put it like that," she pouts, forgetting that it's dark and he can't see. "Does Neptune even have suburbs?" He kisses the inside of her wrist, the bastard, like he doesn't know how much it gets or — or, well, like he knows. "Anyway," she clears her throat, "we'll be the cool parents, you'll see."

As soon as she says it she realizes and wants to slap herself, retreat back into that careful haze of plausible deniability they'd been navigating in without even noticing, because they've both been around lawyers way too much since they were kids.

There's a silence; she hears it tick down in her chest. 

Then — "Maybe we will," he whispers, and his lips open on her throat, hungry, probably for silence more than for sex, the chance to let all of it simmer until it doesn't feel like one of them is going to rush out to puke out all the feelings in the bathroom sink. She arches into it. You and me both, buddy, she thinks. 

 

—

 

The next few days feel a little surreal. She doesn't talk about it, and neither does he, and it's a little bit like a respite, walking through Logan's wide white house and imagining how it would look like with a child in it. 

The South-facing window, with a baby bowled over on the carpet, hands thick with playdough and baby fat, laughing, who they would pretend has Logan's piercing eyes or Veronica's proud forehead even though he – she? – is as nondescript as a baby ever is. 

(On the other hand: Lianne Mars bailing as soon as things got tough, leaving her fifteen-year-old daughter to mourn her dead best friend in silence and snip her grief away with scissors, serious and cynical as her mother stumbles and wastes away into addiction.)

Logan with that wide, unpretending expression he gets sometimes when he thinks she can't see, looking at something really beautiful; offering a finger for his child to hold onto and laughing, startled; thoroughly unprepared, of course, but who isn't — and besides, who better than the two of them when it comes to improvising, to facing the unknown with fists on their hips and a mouthful of teeth? 

(But also: Lynn tottering on the bridge, battered, weak; Lynn who never tried to get her husband to stop hitting Logan, who never ran away; Lynn who knew about the belts and was the one to buy them, even, not out of cruelty but out of some twisted kind of housewifely duty, thick hard leather that would burn permanent scars into her son's back; Lynn with her ashen face, incapable of anything but falling forward, falling, falling, for the police to drag the morning after, so full with chemically-induced numbness she didn't even float...)

Veronica getting comically and paradoxically fat, five foot nothing and a belly protruding from under her top, resting her $10, 000 camera equipment on her bellybutton. Veronica with babyfood all over her fingers, scrunching up her nose and making disgusted quips, dredging up quotes from all the Judd Appatow comedies she used to swear up and down she hadn't seen.

(And: Keith Mars, the only rock in this sea of wasting parental examples, trying and failing to shield his teenage hurricane from the damage of the world, of a town as profoundly toxic as Neptune; Keith Mars when faced up to the Kane empire, another set of genitors rotten to the bone, Celeste so devastated she hadn't shed a tear at her daughter's funeral; Keith Mars in a town when children die before their parents, and parents lie, over and over...)

The barbecues in Keith's infinitesimally small garden, Veronica's old friends mixed with the new, Logan finally almost at ease with them, holding his three-year-old by the hand, smiling from the corner of his mouth, fingers wrapped around a beer bottle... birthdays and fights and being as ordinary as Veronica never, ever wanted to be, despite what she claims; and getting home at night after nailing corrupt police officers and cheating husbands to find her high-school flame, of all people, sitting cross-legged on the floor playing with Legos. 

(With, what, Trina Echolls as a doting aunt? Trina who kept out of Neptune but couldn't keep out of the greed for coke and fame, who is vapid only not to be wrecked, maybe, Trina who hates her brother for no particular reason, because hatred is the only way they found not to completely fall apart? That Trina?)

And of course there are all the trite sayings, "You'll never know until you try," but some gambles are just a little too dangerous to take. Then again — 

"Penny for your thoughts?"

He startles it out of her, the, "Don't be stingy, Echolls, you can do better than small change. It's top-notch stuff, you know."

He laughs, but his eyes are serious, the way they are now, slightly terrifying too. He gathers her against his chest. His breath humming through her acts like a shot of morphine, dulls the world around her so she can dismiss it entirely and focus on the regular beat of his heart, the warmth of his arms around her.

His gaze catches on the window, his arms tightening around her minutely; she whispers, "Same thing as you," into his T-shirt, just to let him know that he's not alone setting the changing table by that disgusting coffee table he got from IKEA. 

 

—

 

He goes to the clinic with her on his last day of leave, holding her hand so hard it's like he wants to reduce her bones to dust. She can't blame him. When was the last time someone told her love shouldn't hurt? Suckers. 

The paparazzi have given up tailing him when they discovered she was exponentially less interesting than Carrie Bishop, private dick or not, so at least that's that taken care of. Not that the people at the clinic won't recognize at least one of them, but Veronica draws the line at doing something as seedy as going out of town to get a fucking abortion. Besides, it's not like she isn't used to airing her dirty laundry in public.

There's a useless, desperate chuckle tickling her throat and she can't help but remember the days of being a pigtailed private investigator, shaking at the thought of someone, anyone, putting his hands on her, unflinchingly giving out the number for the abortion clinic to fourteen-year-olds and swearing she would _never_. Kids having kids, she'd thought then. This is ten years later, but it doesn't feel all that different.

"You're not going to regret this?" Logan asks, voice white, carefully neutral. 

_Of course I'll regret this._ If she thinks even a little about the thing inside her having hands and toes, rabid pro-lifers be damned, she's going to fucking puke. 

"This isn't one-shot only, Echolls. Unless you've been keeping secrets and your sperm's all out of stamina."

It's as close as she can get to a promise, a half-veiled insinuation that maybe, one day, when they've sweated out a few more demons and it doesn't take the cover of complete darkness to talk about pushing a real live human out of her vagina — but he seems to understand that, because the only times they're not utterly confused by each other they understand each other completely. He leans in to kiss her, palm splayed at the small of her back, hot and searing and only slightly desperate.

"Well," Veronica says with bravado she doesn't have, "I hope you're ready to be my nurse, Echolls. I expect frequent foot massages and a steady stream of pornographic mimes to keep me entertained while I lick my wounds."

He smiles in half-crescent, ducking to kiss her forehead. "Always."


End file.
